New ISSMGE TC304 Course on “Probability Analysis in Civil Engineering” by Dr. Jie Zhang

Professor Jie Zhang of Tongji University (China) is delivering a course on Probability Analysis in Civil Engineering under the auspices of the Virtual University of the International Society of Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (ISSMGE). The course is a contribution of the ISSMGE Technical Committee on Engineering Practice of Risk Assessment and Management.

You can register for free to the course on Probability Analysis in Civil Engineering by clicking here.

About the course:

Uncertainties are pervasive in geotechnical engineering. In the past decades, reliability methods have been developed as a powerful tool to model and quantify the effect of uncertainties in geotechnical engineering. The purpose of this course is to systematically introduce the reliability methods in the context of geotechnical engineering.

There are four modules in this course:

1. Analytical models for modeling uncertainties
2. Reliability methods
3. Reliability-based design, and
4. Bayesian methods for uncertainty reduction

Students can choose to learn one or more modules that they are interested in. A unique feature of this course is that the reliability methods are taught using a computation visualization technique, through which almost all the reliability methods are implemented and illustrated in Microsoft Excel. As such, the programming work involved in the reliability methods is bypassed, which will provide an efficient and transparent way to learn reliability methods effectively. Although this course is taught using examples in geotechnical engineering, the knowledge learned are also applicable to general civil engineering problems.

About Dr. Jie Zhang:

Dr. Jie Zhang is a Professor at the Department of Geotechnical Engineering of Tongji University, China. He received his PhD degree in Civil Engineering from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2009. He is currently the secretary of TC304, ISSMGE, and is one of the founding managing editors of the journal of Underground Space. His research mainly focuses on probabilistic analysis and assessment of geohazards.